Gunther Stent had invited him to go back to the United States for another year. Elie and I did a lot of things at the time. In particular, we did all of the- when studying lysogeny and its genetic with K12, we mainly did the K12 system, the study of- we dissected the mechanism and the injection etc.
The conjugation-
That's right. Where we were able to map out with time, etc. With that, he returned to Stent's laboratory and nonetheless we had equipment- That K12, with its injection system, was nevertheless exceptional to analyse cellular functions. So, with Monod we decided- we're going to look at how lactose works. There was a specific lactose region, we could take receiving bacteria with the deletion of the lactose region, inject lactose, see how the Z(+) gene, the three genes and I(+) manifest themselves. So we started dissecting all of that system. And then- Elie had vanished. And we did the majority of our work in his absence, he never got over it. Never.
He got the impression that he'd missed the right moment.
Yes. All the more so since that's what we got the Nobel Prize for and he didn't really like that.
And you had kept fond memories of your collaboration with Elie Wollman?
We kept them until the day he left. And when he came back- At that point I started working with Monod, we did a lot of things. When Wollman came back, I invited him to come back and work with us. Never! That was typical. It was something we had started without him, he wasn't going to jump back onto the wagon.

François Jacob (1920-2013) was a French biochemist whose work has led to advances in the understanding of the ways in which genes are controlled. In 1965 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Jacque Monod and André Lwoff, for his contribution to the field of biochemistry. His later work included studies on gene control and on embryogenesis. Besides the Nobel Prize, he also received the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science for 1996 and was elected a member of the French Academy in 1996.

Michel Morange is a professor of Biology and Director of the Centre Cavaillès of History and Philosophy of Science at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. After having obtained a Bachelor in biochemistry and two PhDs, one in Biochemistry, the other in History and Philosophy of Science, he went on to join the research unit of Molecular Genetics headed by François Jacob, in the Department of Molecular Biology at the Pasteur Institute, Paris. Together with Olivier Bensaude, he discovered that Heat Shock Proteins are specifically expressed on the onset of the mouse zygotic genome activation. Since then he has been working on the properties of Heat Shock Proteins, their role in aggregation and on the regulation of expression of these proteins during mouse embryogenesis. He is the author of 'A History of Molecular Biology' and 'The Misunderstood Gene'.